Media Literacy (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Freyberg Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Freyberg (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, and the Communications and Digital Committee on their timely report, which is clear-eyed about the scale of the challenge before us.

The report makes a compelling case for media literacy being no longer a specialist skill but a fundamental requirement for democratic participation. The concern is urgent. As we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, less than one-third of adults are confident that they can identify AI-generated content. Further, a 2024 Ofcom survey found that 52% of UK adults now use social media as a news source. That combination of mass dependence on social platforms and mass difficulty in evaluating what appears on them is precisely the vulnerability that the committee is right to address.

The report highlighted that provision has been uneven and fragile. As the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, said, media literacy in schools has at times been limited to a one-off or an annual assembly, or confined to optional subjects, making provision a postcode lottery. Outside school, it has fallen largely to underfunded third-sector organisations with no long-term strategic vision. The committee was right to conclude that only the Government can drive real progress.

The curriculum and assessment review, published in November 2025, and today’s media literacy action plan, recommended strengthening media literacy in English and citizenship and introducing a statutory requirement at primary level. Updated RSHE guidance, taking effect from September 2026, will address AI, deepfakes and online misogyny. These are welcome steps, but they must be matched with proper teacher training. I am glad that there has been a recognition of this in the action plan. Teachers have been clear that media literacy must be statutory and curriculum-aligned, not a tick-box exercise.

In speaking today, I want to focus on one aspect of media literacy that is sometimes overlooked: visual literacy. Much of today’s communication is no longer primarily textual; it is visual, multimodal and increasingly generated or altered by artificial intelligence, with around 5 billion constructed images shared every day. If media literacy is about understanding messages, visual literacy—the ability to interpret, question and evaluate images—is now one of its core components. As Alison Cole of the Cultural Policy Unit has argued, it should be regarded as a cornerstone of media literacy itself.

There is already practical evidence of what this can look like. Art UK’s Superpower of Looking programme is active in nearly 3,000 schools, developing children’s visual literacy through engagement with works of art. Oxford University’s Picture This initiative is evaluating such approaches in building visual literacy and the oracy skills that feature prominently in the curriculum review. The Government should ensure that visual literacy is explicitly embedded in the reformed curriculum, not left to individual schools or voluntary programmes. Nor is visual literacy merely a school concern. Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency published a report earlier this year arguing that it has become essential national infrastructure in an age of deepfakes and algorithmically amplified disinformation.

The skill of careful, critical observation is equally transferable in professional life: the New York Police Department has used art to improve officers’ capacity for unbiased visual assessment. We should treat visual literacy as the civic competency that it is. This matters because the current regulatory framework has not kept pace with how information is now communicated online. There are no general obligations on social media platforms to identify sources of content, verify factual information or label AI-generated images. Clearer labelling, particularly where content is presented as factual or depicts a real person, would be a practical step towards restoring transparency, provided it distinguishes deceptive uses of AI from legitimate creative work. Denmark has already legislated to give its citizens rights over their own digital likeness, and the United States is actively considering similar federal protections. The UK should be engaging with those developments rather than waiting.

The report gives us a clear direction. The task now is to act on it, by embedding visual literacy in our schools, improving transparency around AI-generated content and developing legal frameworks that address real harms without stifling creativity.